May 2020 // Read our CEO, Dekel Taliaz, revealing insights on why improved access to global data is vital to the fight against COVID-19 and future pandemics.
COVID-19 continues to spread around the globe, putting the world in the midst of a crisis unlike anything seen before with unimaginable financial and social costs. Nonetheless, these great difficulties present great opportunities for bold innovators to bypass bureaucracy and leapfrog their competitors while rolling out revolutionary products at speed and scale. Even in the midst of an economic crisis, startups can benefit from downturns by having the right leadership. Israeli digital health innovation has demonstrated this clearly.
In order to roll out cutting-edge solutions and interventions, we vitally need one thing: easy collection of data and shared access to reliable global medical data and insights.
Despite this, three months into the outbreak, physicians are turning to experimental treatments blindfolded, unsure where to start or which strategies are most likely to work.
The lack of both epidemiological and clinical data has become a huge concern for Dr. Dekel Taliaz, CEO of personalized medicine startup Taliaz, and President of Digital Health Technologies Israel, an umbrella body representing the digital health ecosystem in Israel. “We would be in a very different place if we had better access to up-to-date global medical insights”, he says. “Rather than decision makers relying on outdated or irrelevant statistics, they would have the power to make flexible decisions based on real-life conditions.”
This, of course, applies to future COVID-19 outbreaks and other pandemics, as it provides the world data and tools to be able to better predict and pinpoint the next outbreak.